UMCA's election committee

An anonymous person commented on the blog, asking about the UMCA’s election committee and whether we have inputs in this. Mavis told this anonymous person: “We felt like we have a foot of a mile influence on these new election rules.”

If anyone noticed, there are four anonymous people on the SaveUMCA team. These people are working hard and can’t be public yet and the SaveUMCA team have faith in them to do everything they can. In Mavis Irwin's personal case, she was asked to be on the election committee too, but she recognized she have to sign a code to be silence and give up any personal power. Mavis won’t be able to sleep well with this over her head. Mavis's hats are off to the others who are able to handle this.

Those involved did note that they are not having much influence because, like they stated, Hughes clearly wanted to have as much control as possible. If those people had more influence, below would be the election standards as opposed to those on page 26 of the Sept-Oct 2007 UMCA magazine:

1) There are no minimum years of membership. (Mavis Irwin, a member for 2 ½ years couldn’t run in the 2008 election even through she was in last year’s election because under the new rules she had to be a member for three or more years first.)

2) The election is open to all. No committees of any kind to select the candidates to be on the ballots. There are only five candidates this year because most from last year’s election were silenced by the new rules instituted by the UMCA. This was one of the ways to keep qualified people from questioning the UMCA government. The rejected applications could have petitioned at least 30 UMCA members done within four weeks by written letters (not e-mails.). This meant that a UMCA member must pay an annual due of $35.00, then an additional $24.60 in postage stamps in order to appear on a ballot, assuming one can compile all the paper work in time. Of course, the UMCA could state that the mail never arrived on time or the mail could get misplaced in the office. Some of the candidates in the last election are familiar with the stated “clerical” errors.

3) Candidates are allowed to campaign in any methods they want. Has anyone heard of the federal, state, and local’s democratic governments passing laws banning advertising in magazines, mailing endorsement letters, and hosting websites? The UMCA has tried to make the campaign fair to all candidates—as reported in the reference of this blog post:

We would push for banning UMCA from favoring any particular candidates in their campaigning. If the UMCA gave the resources to one person campaigning for one or more candidates, UMCA must give exactly the same resources to the other candidates.